


Holiday Gifting 2015

by scribblscrabbl



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Christmas fic, Gen, M/M, holiday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-04 14:04:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 7,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5336795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of holiday ficlets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. revelations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For earlgreytea68, who prompted me with tree-trimming.

“Trim the tree,” Arthur echoes as Dom disappears out the door with the kids in tow bundled up in so many layers they’re like the round little snowmen in the front yard, only more shrill and more devious, more prone to teaming up with Eames to scare the bejesus out of Arthur when he rounds a corner. “Like, hang up ornaments and that – furry stuff.”

“Tinsel.” Ariadne looks at him askance as she pads away into the family room, feet stuffed into plush reindeer slippers. “You’re acting like you’ve never seen tinsel before.”

Eames is perched on the sofa when they walk in, scrolling on his phone, eyebrows knitted in concentration, wearing a Christmas sweater that says _Happy Christmas_ , because it’s just like him – to go out of his way to be English and gripe about the English in the same goddamn breath.

“Do we want to know Martha Stewart’s tree-trimming secrets?” he asks, sounding deadly serious. “Or perhaps 16 ways to trim your Christmas tree like a pro, brought to you by HGTV? _Find the perfect topper_. Well, now I’m not so sure they’re still talking about trimming a tree.”

“Guys! It’s tree-trimming, not rocket science!” Ariadne snatches Eames’s phone away and tosses it onto the cushions to drive the point home. “You two string up the lights and tinsel, and I’ll unpack the ornaments.”

“We have our marching orders,” Eames says to Arthur, smile lopsided like the letters on his sweater, one of those rare, painful instances when his charm isn’t overdone and laid on thick, it’s pure and just a little bit sweet.

Arthur bends down abruptly to grab the tangle of lights, muttering, “I’ve seen tinsel before.”

They’re about halfway up the tree when Ariadne starts flailing her arms from her spot on the floor, lap overflowing with ornaments. 

“Wait, wait, wait! You’re supposed to start from the top and work your way _down_ , oh my god, have you guys never trimmed a tree before?”

“Um,” Arthur says eloquently. 

Eames is scratching the back of his head, looking sheepish and unsure – and so fucking endearing Arthur forgets all about the secret he’s been trying to keep buried since he knocked on Dom’s door twelve hours ago, hands laden with presents because that’s how it works, he’s heard.

“Well,” Eames starts, then pauses, “no, actually.”

Ariadne blinks owlishly. “Wait, what? Really? Never?”

And Arthur, no longer feeling like the exception, no longer feeling _alone_ , confesses, “neither have I,” still looking at Eames, who’s wearing that smile again, brightening by degrees.

Then Eames turns to Ariadne and shrugs. “It’s our lot in life, we orphans.”

They’ve only ever brought it up once, one of those off-the-cuff remarks that yank hard at your roots but it’s nothing you haven’t felt before.

“And I don’t know any Christmas carols. Not one damn word,” Arthur says, because the cat’s out of the bag now and he has nothing else to lose.

“Never laid out cookies for Santa. Or hung stockings over the fireplace. Do people still do that?” Eames adds, eyes laughing like it’s a game, to see who’s the more miserable asshole, and maybe like he’s telling Arthur, _your story, darling, I know it well_.

“Okay, then,” Ariadne finally speaks up, gnawing at her bottom lip, “what the hell are we waiting for? Let’s start making up for lost time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/134352663174/holiday-fic-no1).


	2. sensation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For involuntaryorange, who prompted me with: Eames finds Arthur's YouTube channel.

Eames finds the thing on Christmas Eve, holed up at an Intercontinental for a job as a favor to Arthur because Eames makes a point of not partaking in the consumerist drivel people call Christmas. And because it’s Arthur, because he’s never been able to say no to those Bambi eyes that could blow a hole through a man’s heart.

Arthur who’s in the next room over in blissful ignorance of what Eames just discovered, by pure happenstance, on his downward YouTube spiral that started with kittens playing the keyboard.

Arthur who’s a scarily competent criminal all hours of the day but apparently still finds time to run a massively popular YouTube channel, username joeschmo12345, featuring nothing but videos of him lip syncing with raw passion to various classics like “No Diggity” and “Papa Don’t Preach.”

The latest upload, _dated just yesterday_ , has Arthur in an elf costume, _an elf costume_ , belting out Mariah Carey’s version of “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and Eames thinks it’s the closest thing he’s ever encountered to science fiction. 

There’s a pointy hat topped off with a bell. There’s a red bowtie, red braces. There’s Arthur asking Eames to make his wish come true being both painfully adorable and weirdly seductive, and Eames is chanting _god help me_ under his breath, feeling like some sort of pedophilic voyeur with Arthur on the other side of the wall as he clicks on replay. 

Arthur the next morning is just – Arthur. Strictly business, no nonsense, solemn mouth, edges like cut diamonds, and Eames feels a little crazy, trying to put Arthur in an elf hat that makes him jingle when he walks. 

“Am I hearing things? Are you humming a _Christmas_ song?” Ariadne asks with shameless delight because she’s tried and failed three years in a row to lure him to the dark side.

“We all make mistakes,” he mumbles. Arthur throws him an odd look.

A week later it’s “Bad Romance” with a blonde wig, sultry lipstick, and a fishnet top flashing iridescent skin that does both terrible and fantastic things to his libido. There’s a wink at the end, lazy, intimate like he’s pulling Eames to him in the dark, making Eames shudder then wonder how many of those other quarter of a million hits are poor bastards who think Arthur’s show is just for them.

Two weeks later it’s “Love Shack” with some rather creative cutting and splicing, and after that, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” featuring several bouts of enthusiastic booty-shaking.

Then Arthur texts him about a job. A job Eames would call business as usual, except there’s something off, something intent about Arthur’s eyes and skittish about Arthur’s hands. Something that makes Eames want to come clean about his addiction, about his withdrawal when he has to wait more than a week for his next hit. Then he looks at Arthur, the Arthur with his dimples hidden and his Glock in plain sight, and he thinks he can indulge for just a bit longer.

The night before the extraction a new video appears, and this Arthur is, Eames takes a minute to work out, something curiously in between. He’s wearing his Oxford from earlier in the day rolled up to his elbows, open at the collar, hair freshly washed and tousled, and he’s staring right at Eames, telling him with a distinctively Scottish accent:

_When I wake up, well, I know I'm gonna be_  
_I'm gonna be the man who wakes up next to you_  
_When I go out, yeah, I know I'm gonna be_  
_I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you_  
_If I get drunk, well, I know I'm gonna be_  
_I'm gonna be the man who gets drunk next to you_

By the time he gets to the chorus, Eames gets another text.

_You’re a fucking idiot._

A minute later, Arthur’s at his door, same shirt, same hair, same eyes blowing a hole through his heart.

“How can a person be so clever and still so goddamn stupid?”

Eames opens his mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. “On rare occasions, when it really matters and that person is terrified of fucking it all up, he needs things spelled out for him.”

Arthur reels him in with a fist in his shirt, mouth swaying towards his.

“Okay then. I did it for you. The stupid wig, the stupid dancing, all of it. Get it now?”

Eames brackets Arthur’s hips with his hands and starts walking them back into the room.

“Hmm, still a bit vague on the details,” he smiles against Arthur’s mouth. “That elf costume might help clear things up.”

“You’re gonna have to earn that one, Mr. Eames.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/134467585924/holiday-fic-no2).


	3. kingdom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For kedgeree, who prompted me with snow play.

For all Eames boasts of his many facets, each more dazzling than the last, Arthur’s learned, over the years, that they can really be distilled into one: a love, profound and eternal, for thumbing his nose at convention. 

Which means he never goes out of his way to acknowledge Christmas, never tries to chop down his own tree like Dom or buys gifts a month in advance like Ariadne, and that suits Arthur just fine. In fact, he’d rather wake up to Eames humming “Deck the Halls” around his cock than to neatly wrapped boxes under a tree. He’d rather be crisscrossing Eastern Europe ditching passports as fast as Eames can forge them than at home opening the door to carolers. And if he said none of it was personal, then he’d be lying, so he doesn’t say anything at all.

But this year throws him for a loop. This year, as the clock strikes midnight on Christmas Eve on their job in Melbourne where the temperature hit 89 by noon, Eames tells him, “I have something for you,” looking fidgety when Eames doesn’t _do_ fidgety, and Arthur’s instinct is to stiffen, to deflect, to run like hell the other way.

Instead he just says, “okay,” because he knows better now, after all these years, knows that self-preservation buys you nothing but solitude.

“It’s not a big deal, really,” Eames adds, going from fidgety to straight-up nervous. “Actually, it’s probably silly, a bit stupid, really stupid,” and now he’s just babbling.

“Eames,” Arthur says, around a laugh he can’t for the life of him swallow down, “just show me already.”

Turns out what Eames has for him is a dream. And not just any dream. A towering, sprawling one covered edge to edge with snow.

“You – ” Arthur says, then pauses because something, somewhere in him is starting to ache, unbearable but sweet. “You built me a snow city.”

“Snow kingdom,” Eames amends, looking a little more sure now that Arthur hasn’t laughed at him or run for the hills. “There’s also a snow round table and a snow sword in a snow stone.”

Eames is teasing now, voice melodic, eyes glittering to match the landscape, and when Arthur draws in a shuddering breath, the air is exquisitely sharp. 

It’s a quaint little kingdom with cobblestoned paths and steepled roofs, centuries-old pines, a river snaking through it, a ribbon of ice, and at its mouth a storybook castle. It’s a secret Arthur told Eames some time ago, because he tells Eames secrets now – shallow ones he can shed without feeling a thing, and deep ones he extracts like broken bone. He told Eames, half asleep with his face pressed against Eames’s chest, that his mom told him fairy tales on Christmas Eve. Not the gruesome ones that end in heartbreak or death or something equally fucked up, but ones that made him see winter wonderlands when he closed his eyes, made him dream.

“I didn’t get you anything,” he says stupidly, rather than saying, _you remembered_ and _it’s exactly how I pictured it_ and _she would’ve loved it, she would’ve loved you_.

Eames cocks his head, looking more mischievous by the second, more capable of thieving hearts, and says, “All I want for Christmas, darling, is to kick your arse in a snowball fight.”

Which is when a snowball comes out of nowhere and hits Arthur square in the chest, making him look down, momentarily stunned, then back up at Eames’s effervescent delight.

“Oh, bring it on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/134544938384/holiday-fic-no3).


	4. epistolary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For upsidedowntea, who prompted me with Eames and Arthur's first holidays together featuring a surprising and unusual tradition.

It’s when they’re cruising over the Atlantic on their way to Lake Tahoe that Eames is struck by a terribly clever idea.

“I think I should British up our first Christmas. What do you say?”

Arthur turns away from his cloud-watching to raise his eyebrows at Eames, mouth twitching, shoulders loose because their job in Mendoza went off without a hitch and they’re heading to colder climates, his kind of climate.

“Is that code for something you can’t say in public?”

“No, but it’s nearly as fun,” Eames assures, knocking their knees together by way of saying, _c’mon, let me, let me_.

“That’s pretty high commendation,” Arthur says, smile full-blown now, its topography as singularly devastating as his beloved Sierra Nevada if Eames has anything to say about it. “Will you pout and whine if I don’t say okay?”

“I don’t pout,” Eames says, pressing his lips together to make a point.

Arthur just smiles some more and says, “Okay.”

*

Eames buys all the necessary ingredients on Amazon and it all arrives a day later. For all he’d rather civilization return to the dark ages when people actually talked to each other and read real books, he concedes there’s something to be said for expedited capitalism.

When the slopes close on Christmas Eve, Eames makes his favorite holiday treat that makes him think of crackling fires, his mother humming Christmas carols, sounding smoky and sweet like the treacle she swirled into her tarts. 

“Mulled wine?” Arthur says, peering into the pot, rubbing his wet hair with a towel, the scent of him mixing with the spices. “I’ve had mulled wine before.”

“If you haven’t had the Eames family version, you haven’t had mulled wine.”

“There’s an Eames family version, huh?” Arthur looks at him, teeth tugging briefly on his lower lip. 

Eames rarely talks about his childhood because Arthur rarely talks about his. Because when Arthur does talk about it, he gets a faraway look that makes Eames want, reflexively, to latch onto him before he wanders beyond Eames’s reach.

“Satisfaction guaranteed,” Eames says, leaning in to distract him with a kiss, tongue pressing in and drawing out a low, contented hum. “But reserve some of your excitement for tomorrow. There will be pudding, and Christmas crackers, and a message from the Queen.”

Arthur laughs suddenly, a bright, explosive sound, and it’s a bit like seeing fireworks when you least expect it. “This obsession of yours with the monarchy. It’s the Great Unsolved Mystery.”

“I’m not _obsessed_.”

“You _placed bets_ , plural, on the name of the royal baby.”

“I like wasting money in creative ways,” Eames says primly.

“Yea, okay.” Arthur grins, resting a hip against the counter. “What are Christmas crackers?”

Eames looks at him askance. “What has establishing a republic actually done for America. I mean, really.”

“I can always defect. Depends on how good these crackers are.”

“You’ll have to live in suspense until tomorrow. Tonight, though, we’ll write our letters.”

Arthur blinks. “As in letters to Santa Claus? Aren’t we a little old for that?”

“Of course not,” Eames says easily, stirring the wine. “Then we’ll make a fire and burn them, so Father Christmas can read them in the ashes that scatter to the winds.”

Two hours later, he finds Arthur, not at the fireplace conveniently built into the living room, but in the backyard, having already made a mini bonfire, hair ruffled by the wind picking up from the northeast, no hat or gloves in sight. Eames, in contrast, looks like an Eskimo, because for all the winters he’s seen he’s never acclimated to this kind of cold. It’s beautiful, though – beautiful in the way it surrounds Arthur with a savage spirit that seeps into his bones.

When Eames gets closer, he sees paper fluttering in Arthur’s hands.

“Maybe you should proofread it before I send it out,” Arthur tells him, eyes alight with barely-contained secrets.

Eames takes the proffered letter, heart beating in the cavern of his chest like drums.

_Dear Santa, or Father Christmas, whatever you prefer:_

_I’ve never done this before so I’m not sure if there are any rules I should be following. I only have one request and it’s an unconventional one probably so bear with me, if you can, to the end. I’d like to wish for a little courage. Let me be more specific. I’m not asking for the kind that helps me do my job, or the kind you need to sever one life to start another. I want the kind that helps me do something selfless to deserve what I have. I’m not a great person, or even a good one, and what I have now is good, so good sometimes I think it’s a mistake. But I want to fight tooth and nail for it. I want to say beautiful things with no regrets. I want to tell the truth. I just need a kick-start._

Eames stops reading and manages to say, “darling,” before his throat closes indefinitely.

And then he pulls Arthur to him by the wrists, pressing their foreheads together, fingers laced tight. 

There’s one thing he loves about this wilderness, independent of Arthur, and that’s the stars, which shine unimpeded from where they stand, light years away but scintillating like diamonds you can pluck from the sky. He’s never been a natural at physics but he remembers learning about the origins of the universe, and he thinks he feels that heat now, a density contracting and expanding into an immensity that hurts to fathom. 

When, finally, he gets his wits about him, he says, feeling Arthur tremble against him, “I don’t know about Santa, but you have me convinced.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/134666472874/holiday-fic-no4).


	5. journey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For chasingriversong, who prompted me with holiday travel.

Arthur hates airports, and it’s not just a professional inconvenience. He loves flying, the feeling of being airborne, clouds that look more like art than science up close. He loves traveling, being the intrepid explorer he, at the age of eight, thought he might want to be when he grew up and graduated from books to real life. 

But airports are a necessary evil. Airports are the only places where he stands in a crowd and still feels lonely. Airports turn him into the kind of asshole he shoves into the back of his closet along with his suits between jobs: liable to take out a guy’s kneecaps when he’s making Arthur’s life harder than it needs to be. Which is to say, airports make him goddamn near impossible to live with.

“Our flight is delayed two hours,” Arthur says hollowly, staring at the scrolling list of departures. “Two hours of my life I’ll never get back, wasted sitting at Heathrow. Oh, wait, make that five hours. How could I forget that we spent _three fucking hours_ going through check-in and security. I’m barring us from traveling over the holidays ever again. We are officially fucking barred.”

“Hey, hey, let’s just breathe,” Eames says, turning him around with two hands palming his neck, thumbs sliding along the tension in his jawline, “we’ll put this into perspective, shall we? You’ve handled worse. Nearly falling into limbo, remember that one? Or the time we got roped into the job at the convent and couldn’t have sex for a month. Or – oh, I’ve got a good one. Cobb giving you relationship advice.”

Arthur stares at Eames and breathes. He stares, not really listening, until his periphery blurs, and just like that he’s thinking about this morning when Eames took his coffee out of his hands and drew him back to bed, mouth curved, a hook in his heart. He’s thinking about last night when he found Eames on the back porch sipping Scotch, eyes burning when they looked at him, so luminous in the dark it wouldn’t be so different from celestial navigation, following them home.

“Just – don’t go anywhere,” Arthur smiles. “because I’d be completely fucking lost without you.”

Eames says nothing. Eames tightens his hold on Arthur and then lets him go, because it’s the only time Eames gets tongue-tied. It’s the only time he searches through his collection of words, beautiful and formidable, and finds it inadequate, maybe because he’s terrified of picking the wrong ones, or maybe because he doesn’t _know_. Eames’s instinct is to tell stories, the more circuitous the better so you forget where one ends and the next one begins, but Arthur – Arthur’s always been drawn to the pure and simple truth. So he says it enough for the both of them.

They pop into a couple shops to buy the spy novel Arthur’s been meaning to read since last Christmas, and a Santa hat that Eames pulls on right at the cash register, not bothering to rip off the tag so Arthur rolls his eyes and does it for him.

When they reach the gate, Arthur glances at their tickets and says, “wait, what the fuck. We’re not even in the same fucking row. How did that happen? And – B is a middle seat. They stuck me in a goddamn middle seat.”

“Darling,” Eames says, looking ready to tackle him to the ground if necessary, “you know you’ll only feel worse if you make someone cry.”

Arthur glances at Eames, at his ridiculous hat that actually makes him look stupidly charming and just a little bit sexy, and sighs. “I’ll inquire gently.”

When he finds Eames twenty minutes later, Eames is talking to a little girl of about four or five, elbows on his knees, showing her magic tricks with his poker chip and making her giggle uncontrollably. Arthur sets his bag down three seats over, without a word because he loves watching Eames with kids, knows by now that Eames is a natural and what makes him so adept is he doesn’t know how to rein in his imagination or why he ever would.

“I’m tired of magic tricks, tell me a story, something wonderful,” the little girl demands, too precocious by half, clambering into the seat next to Eames.

Eames pockets his chip and presses his lips together in thought.

“All right. I’ll tell you a story about a prince and a knight. Not many have heard this one, so you’ll be one of the special few,” he says, leaning in conspiratorially. “Once upon a time, there was a prince who lived in a castle. It wasn’t your usual fairy-tale castle filled with banquets and balls. It was a lonely one, most of its rooms locked up and hidden in shadow, with nothing but echoes and ghostly shapes for company. The prince decided time and again to leave and never return, seek out exotic lands and glittering treasure and forget about what he’d left behind. But every time he would come back, perhaps hoping to see it magically transformed and filled with people, with dancing and laughter. Every time he’d come back from a more faraway land and leave with a sicker heart. Then one day, his travels were interrupted by a knight, with armor gleaming and sword brandished, hunting dragons.”

Eames looks up then, finding Arthur without missing a beat. 

“He was a beautiful sight, determined, brave, terrifyingly skilled with his sword. And when he smiled you could see straight to his heart and it looked whole and pure, the way a heart should be. He told the prince, there is danger around every corner, no one should be traveling alone, join me on my journey. But the prince – the prince had never met anyone like him, had always traveled alone, so he said, foolishly, I don’t need to be saved. The knight, however, didn’t give up. Too clever for his own good, he said only this in reply: well, maybe I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/134919268729/holiday-fic-no5).


	6. symphony

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For ladyprydian, who prompted me with Arthur and Eames blending Jewish and Christian holiday traditions.

“You know some people might look at this and call it unprofessional.”

Arthur leans in to light his cigarette, cheeks smooth and pale as winter, fingers loosely curled, the way they are after the final fermata, boneless against his strings. Behind him the Lincoln Center is a luminous gold under the evening lights, a palace for the masses.

Arthur raises his eyebrows, taking his first drag. Eames snaps his lighter shut and tucks it into his pocket, next to the stress ball his doctor tells him will improve his circulation during the draftiest months in the hall.

“The maestro can’t share a smoke with his concertmaster?”

Eames plucks the cigarette out of Arthur’s hand and smiles freely.

“It’s not my reputation I’m worried about.”

Arthur turns his collar up against the chill, watching Eames with those steady eyes he never has on his music because, rumor has it, he knows everything by heart.

“You forget this isn’t London. No stiff upper lips around here. Everyone does whatever the fuck they want. Whoever they want.”

Arthur’s teasing him. Arthur enjoys teasing him when he least expects it, that much he’s learned about his concertmaster apart from his professional habits. That and the sounds Arthur makes when he’s being attentively sucked off, stage left, and he’d rather not test the acoustics.

“Brave new world,” Eames murmurs, watching Arthur’s dimples deepen, thinking he could compose symphonies for those dimples, a movement for every gradation that moves people to weeping. “But there’s one thing that never changes. Handel’s _Messiah_ come Christmas. People never get sick of it. The first time my parents took me – dragged would be the technical term – I kicked and screamed. Bit my dad’s arm so hard it bled. Now I’m conducting it.” 

He takes another drag on the cigarette before handing it back to Arthur. “The world, it turns out, is fond of nothing if not irony.”

“I never kicked or screamed. I sulked,” Arthur tells him easily. “Scowled through entire programs and even when I enjoyed it, I refused to admit it. I thought I had principles.”

Eames thinks he’d be tempted to make a deal with the Devil just to see that small sullen Arthur, the heart of him peeking through for Sibelius, Stravinsky, when no one was looking.

“Handel never sent you into religious raptures?”

“No.” Arthur blows a thin stream of smoke out of the corner of his mouth, tipping his head back to watch its fading trajectory. “I’m Jewish.”

Eames blinks, letting that bit of information sink in.

“Arthur, if it doesn’t sit well with you or offends you in any way, please let me – ”

“What? No, I didn’t mean – ” Arthur glances at Eames then looks down, flicking ash off the end of his cigarette. “I don’t practice it. I’m not even religious really.”

He stops but Eames knows to wait, because he’s trained most his life to distinguish between sound and silence, and he hears something now, clinging to the air like a delicate diminuendo.

Arthur turns toward the street, the stream of traffic that thins but never ceases, intolerable to some but Eames sees it for what it really is. The blood that gives the city its breath.

“My grandfather was a pianist, a child prodigy, but at 15 he was deported to Birkenau with his parents and his older sister. He was the only one who made it to the liberation, but his hands – ” Arthur passes the cigarette to Eames without turning. “They stomped on his hands once, when they were beating him. The bones didn’t heal right and then they just couldn’t be fixed. He didn’t touch a piano again until my mom was already in her 20s, too old to start learning how to dedicate her life to music. So he tried to make up for lost time with me. He couldn’t play Bach or Rachmaninov, but you could just tell he was the real thing. Sometimes when he sat me down to listen to one of his recordings, I’d just watch him and – his face would tell me everything, how to breathe and drown and breathe again with every measure.”

Eames listens and he understands. This is what drives Arthur, this commingling of grief and history and rapture, messy in part but wholly pure, that makes Arthur pull sounds from his instrument like he’s drawing blood from his veins.

“Mahler was his favorite composer. He said the music showed us we could always be better than who we are,” Arthur says with a smile Eames wants to taste, to drink from until he feels a fraction of what it’s like to have that music so old and deep in his roots.

Instead he says, “ _If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music_ ,” and watches Arthur’s smile widen.

*

Nine days before preview night, Eames changes the program.

“But,” Yusuf blinks, “people bought tickets for Handel’s _Messiah_.”

“Mahler’s 8th Symphony?” Robert says, looking faint.

Ariadne, balancing her flute on her thighs, is positively gleeful. “Dom’s gonna have a fucking conniption. Who knew being a professional flutist would be this much fun?”

But Arthur’s silent. Arthur’s staring at Eames, knuckles bone-white around his violin, jaw clenching like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or fling his bow at Eames’s head.

“I know when I replaced Saito four months ago I disrupted the status quo,” Eames says sympathetically because he’s been here before – a variable throwing a perfectly-functioning algorithm into chaos – but there’s no compromising, not with this. “I’m unorthodox, I’m mercurial, I’m chronically late to everything, I spoil you and abuse you. Frankly, I’m a bloody lunatic. But I love this institution and this orchestra, make no mistake. I want us to be leaders, visionaries, to revive and reinvent and remind people that this music isn’t a fixation on what’s dead and buried, it’s a celebration of the things that endure.”

And with Arthur in his sights, he says, “And what of the naysayers, you ask? Well, I reckon we’ll let the music speak for itself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/135516174874/holiday-fic-no6).
> 
> Inspired by _Mozart in the Jungle._
> 
> Mahler's work was banned in much of Europe during the Nazi era.


	7. destination

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For justgot1, who prompted me with artist!Eames.

Arthur enters the park on the east side, from 66th. He dips a hand inside his coat pocket, running a thumb along the edge of the post-it note at the bottom, three by three, neon blue, with _EAMES_ scrawled on it in the neat block lettering of an architect. 

Ariadne said word on the street is, this guy’s something special. This guy will give you what you want if you just believe. He didn’t ask how Ariadne, with her fluttery flower-print scarves and neon-colored post-it notes, would know anything about ‘the street,’ not for lack of curiosity, only lack of commitment. He likes her well enough, he just doesn’t see the point of building bridges if he’s going to torch them in the end.

He takes his time walking down the Mall with its elms, stripped by winter, that make the world look inverted, roots feeding into the sky. Yesterday in the half-dark of his apartment he thought he had nothing to lose. Now in the morning glare with snow crunching under his boots, he feels like a fucking idiot because he’d probably be better off trying to find a priest to exorcise his demons.

“Now you look like you want to be anywhere but here.”

He blinks, turning, and finds an artist perched at the edge of the bench with the kind of face, the kind of mouth you’d see in a cologne ad, the kind that never stays undiscovered for long. Then Arthur looks down at his easel, the rich warm mahogany and thin gold lettering stamped on the edge that says _Eames Traveling Emporium_.

“You’re Eames?” he says stupidly and watches a smile unfurl, like one of those little spheres of tea that bloom in water.

“Depends on what you’re looking for.”

Arthur eyes the lettering again. “What do you sell?”

Eames pulls at his scarf, which is when Arthur sees that for all he’s wearing shades of gray from head to toe, his gloves – fingerless, fraying at the edges – are Christmas red.

“Paintings, sometimes. Postcards, if you’re into that sort of thing. But mostly dreams.”

Arthur swallows, stuffing his hands into his pockets, crumpling the post-it.

“How – how does that work?”

Eames cocks his head, eyes sharp and bright, inscrutable.

“I can show you, if you’d like. Free of charge. Consider it a trial run.”

Arthur looks around them, at the passersby snapping pictures, seconds in time preserved with brute force like insects in amber. He thinks about the few he has of his parents, his sister, of Mal, who always managed to look extraordinary and still like the girl next door.

“Can you give me the sea? A single boat, and the sky high and clean, the way it is right after a storm.”

“As it happens, the sea is something of a speciality for me,” Eames says.

And then he starts to paint, in strokes broad and breathless, minute and painstaking, so hypnotic it takes Arthur a good minute or two to realize he’s not using a palette. Instead the colors are pouring out of his brush, soaking into the canvas in precisely the right shades of azure and cerulean and aquamarine, and Arthur can already smell the brine cracking his chest open, feel the water’s lull beneath him.

When Eames finishes, he says, “it’s ready when you are. Feel free to take a dip, the water’s nice and warm.”

The tidy little boat beckons, its sail ballooning against the wind.

“I won’t get lost, will I?”

Eames looks at him, considering. “There’s only one way out, if that’s what you mean.”

He spends what feels like hours on that boat, just floating blissfully, sprawled on his back on the deck, alternately closing and opening his eyes, sun heating his skin but never burning it. 

And then he’s back in the park, as easy as blinking, with only five minutes gone and Eames watching him like he’s checking that all of Arthur’s limbs are accounted for.

“Thanks, that was – thank you,” Arthur tells him, making sure to smile before walking away.

It takes him three days to work up the guts to go back. After that, it’s no different from putting coffee on in the morning or checking the mail after work. His most frequent request is the boat on the sea, but there’s also the yellow swing set in the park and the strip of beach, sand fine-grained and damp, perfect for sandcastles.

On the tenth day, Eames says when he touches his brush to the canvas, “you’re not like the others. They all want gondolas in Venice and Northern Lights over Reykjavík. But not you.”

He glances at Arthur like Arthur doesn’t owe him anything, he just finds it delightful, trying to figure Arthur out, and Arthur wants to say, _you know me better than anyone_ , which is just plain crazy.

So he says instead, before he can bite his tongue, “come with me this time.”

He’s never seen Eames’s hand stop in the middle of a painting, but it stops now like it’s forgotten where to go next.

“I can’t.” A trickle of ultramarine splits the sky in two and Arthur looks away. “I don’t mean I won’t, I mean I can’t. It doesn’t work that way, it – have you seen the massive Christmas ornaments in front of Radio City?” Arthur turns back, startled, to the sight of Eames pulling off his red gloves, looking beautifully hopeful – and beautiful. “Or gone ice skating in Bryant Park, or browsed the holiday market at Union Square?”

“I – no, I haven’t,” just about makes it out of his mouth before Eames is extending a bare hand, eyes colored like the sea.

“Then how about you come with me. Give me one day to make you think that where you are isn’t so bad. That maybe you want to stay a while.”

Eames is smiling, shifting closer, leaning against Arthur’s heart with the weight of a dropped anchor, and Arthur hears himself say, “okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/135590391679/holiday-fic-no7).


	8. stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for silverukiss, who wanted comfort fic.

“Hey, we’re closing up in 5,” Arthur tells the last straggler at the bar, dark-haired, early 30s, hunched like Atlas with the world on his shoulders. They usually are, the ones who stay after hours on Christmas Eve staring into their glasses, jaws screwed shut, until Arthur fills them up again. 

He usually gives each of them a story, a kid run away from home, a broken heart, nothing they couldn’t survive. He never asks. People in the right light at the right distance he can watch for hours, but people up close, they mostly hurt to look at.

“You need me to call you a cab?” he says, louder this time, and the guy looks up. Eames, Daniel. Arthur’s good with names, keeping them neat and stacked by what’s owed and what’s paid.

“I’m sorry?” 

The voice is slow, slurred, and foreign, recalling dots on a map he’s bridged with his fingers, once. The civility makes him think he can get away with prying the glass from Eames’s hand without getting a shiner for his trouble.

“It’s time to go home.”

“I’d rather stay here for the night if you don’t mind,” Eames mumbles, like his right brain knows it’s impossible but his left won’t let it lie.

“All right, c’mon, I’ll get you a cab.”

Arthur grabs his coat, hitting the lights before guiding Eames out the door, a palm between his shoulder blades.

The minute they’re on the street, Eames is fumbling through his pockets, fishing out a pack of smokes and then crushing it in his hand.

“Fuck,” he says, sounding savage, shattered, making Arthur think he’s not talking about the cigarettes at all. “You don’t – ”

“Sorry, not a smoker.”

“Yea, these things will kill you.” Eames exhales, breath a puff of white in the cold. “I’ve never known what’s good for me. It’s just for a while I – ”

Arthur flags down a cab and pretends he doesn’t feel an enormity splitting the ground at their feet, dangling Eames from a precipice he knows so well he doesn’t blink, just wonders how it deep it goes.

Eames is silent when the cab slows to a stop, when Arthur pulls open the door, places a hand on Eames’s head as he gets in so he doesn’t brain himself against the frame.

“Can you take him to – hey, where’s home?”

Arthur has one knee on the backseat, pressed against Eames’s thigh because Eames hasn’t scooted in a single inch farther than instructed, and Arthur can smell him now, two parts whiskey, one part cologne. It’s the residual – smoke, sweat, mint, dryer sheets – that makes him twitch.

Then Eames is staring at Arthur, eyes as inky bright as the sheen of city streets after the rain, saying, “I can’t,” like it’s the closest he’s ever come to telling the truth.

Arthur stares back, hand fisting against the seat right above Eames’s shoulder, and then says, “well, shit.”

When he gets them to his apartment, he doesn’t bother turning on the lights, just walks Eames, heavy-limbed and half asleep, liquor having caught up with him, into the living room and sets him down on the sofa.

“Jesus, you’re heavier than you look. Here, drink this.” Arthur throws a bottle of water onto Eames’s lap before pulling off his own coat. 

“I’m not normally like this, just so you know,” Eames says, tongue sluggish, looking around at Arthur’s vinyl collection, the Christmas lights trimming the windows, the Nutcracker from a secondhand shop that stands guard on the end table. “I don’t make a habit of going to bars and looking pathetic so the hot bartender will feel sorry for me and bring me home. I don’t – ”

“Look, you don’t have to explain.” Arthur runs a hand through his hair then lets it fall uselessly. “The holidays can be shitty sometimes, I get – ”

“My wife died, last Christmas Eve. There was a fire and – I keep remembering that moment, when you know with perfect clarity that you want to spend the rest of your life with someone. How you never think about all the ways it can go wrong. You postpone things because the horizon feels infinite. You say ‘I love you’ once every minute, then every hour, and then every day. You withhold it when you’re angry or just bloody tired, and you think you can make up for it tomorrow.” Eames stops, breaths thick and wet, half-drowned, and drags two hands down his face. “Christ, I’m a mess. I just had a complete meltdown in your living room and I don’t even know your name, I’m sorry.”

He laughs, short and strangled, and Arthur swallows at the sight, of Eames falling apart and cobbling himself together again, ruinous and beautiful. Arthur thinks this must be what survival looks like, and then walks over to Eames, sitting down beside him.

“Arthur,” he says and, before he can second-guess himself, takes Eames’s hand, the way he thinks he’d want to be touched, running his thumb across Eames’s knuckles before pressing their palms together, feeling Eames shudder, crack, and then hold. “Let me guess, you also don’t normally spill your guts to every hot bartender that takes you home.”

“I’m really quite respectable, I swear,” Eames murmurs, sliding his fingers between Arthur’s, curling his fingertips into the grooves of Arthur’s knuckles then extending to knead the tendons.

“Then – why me?”

At this proximity Arthur can see the clumps of Eames’s lashes, dark and damp, the fine lines of his story, more sweet than terrible.

“Because you didn’t leave me on my arse in the cold on Christmas Eve.” Eames smiles. “Because no matter what you thought you were doing, you were saving me from myself. Because – we get a second chance if we’re lucky, and I don’t want to miss mine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/135975924269/holiday-fic-no8).


	9. pretend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A post-holiday fic for flosculatory, who prompted me with a high school AU involving candy cane grams.

“A candy cane gram? _A candy cane gram_?” Arthur yanks his locker open, chucking his books inside with the strength of his fiery indignation. But because the universe is unfair and his books are soft, flimsy paperbacks, they just bounce off the wall and plop pathetically onto the floor, then taunt him into giving up the last of his dignity.

“All the cool kids are doing it,” Eames smiles, picking up Arthur’s books and handing them over before crossing his arms over his chest like this is an everyday _thing_ , like his kind and Arthur’s kind don’t orbit on different axes light years apart.

“This wasn’t part of the deal,” Arthur hisses, slamming the door shut before remembering he didn’t actually pull anything he needed out of it. “I wanted to get my mom off my back. I didn’t want the entire fucking school to think I’m, I don’t know, _blackmailing_ you into going out with me and sending me fucking candy cane grams.”

He always likes to construct worst case scenarios, just to prepare himself for any eventuality. It’s not that he’s a pariah or a stand-out nerd who quotes Star Trek in AP Physics. He’s not even the guy who gets picked last for dodgeball. He’s just – average. He gets decent grades, volunteers at the soup kitchen a few times a year, swims 1500m a week but never tries out for the team, and has a few friends he’s stuck with since he learned his times tables. He goes about his own business and keeps his head down because he figures it’s his best shot at getting the hell out of Dodge. But Eames – Eames is something else. Eames isn’t just popular. He doesn’t just captain the soccer team and paint stupidly breathtaking murals with the art club, and bake what has to be crack-laced cookies for the bake sale, he’s _nice_. He’s charming and weirdly sweet and he never holds back when he laughs, not afraid to show his god awful teeth, not self-conscious about a damn thing. He’s also unattainable and clearly spoiled, used to getting what he wants, doing what he wants with no regard for how other people might suffer from the consequences. So, actually, he’s an asshole and Arthur wishes he’d just move to fucking Siberia.

“Another layer of deception wouldn’t hurt, would it?” Eames shrugs, leaning in so he can be heard over the ruckus of the entire student body dragging their feet to second period. “Your sister is already suspicious, and parents have eyes and ears everywhere. They’re stealthier than you know. D’you really think all they talk about is our academic progress during those parent-teacher conferences? Anyway, deal is a deal and I don’t do anything by halves.”

Arthur can smell Eames now, clean and warm, can see those flecks of iridescent color in his eyes that beckon like precious metals, and Arthur wants to say fuck the deal, I’ll tutor you anyway, but he can’t, he doesn’t know how. 

“Fine,” he mumbles instead, spinning his lock and going past zero two times too many, “but did you have to get the singing elf, too? Nash warbles like a dying cat.”

And Eames just says, being the asshole he is, “my affection knows no bounds, sweet pea. Besides, your cheeks take on a lovely color when you blush.”

*

Eames, it turns out, is also an attentive fake boyfriend, of course he fucking is. He memorizes Arthur’s schedule, brings Arthur _homemade coffee_ before first period while Ariadne makes kissy faces in the background, and waves at Arthur during soccer practice because apparently Arthur attends those now, to keep up the farce, not to ogle Eames’s backside when he bends down to pull up his socks. Arthur doesn’t do PDA, which works out for the both of them, but sometimes Eames makes a show of dragging a finger down Arthur’s cheek before heading to class and Arthur lets him. From 8:30 to 4, Arthur lets himself be someone else – someone who dates a guy like Eames and holds onto his attention, someone who occupies the center of the universe instead of the periphery for once. It’s after 4 when he reminds himself of who he is, trying not to be the idiot who wastes all his time wanting to be someone else, but feeling a little like that idiot anyway.

*

It’s two days before the Calculus final and four before Christmas break when he catches a glimpse of Eames’s last exam, sticking out of his bookbag that’s propped up against the kitchen table, marked with a 73 in red. He slides it out of its binder and stares at the chicken scratch Eames calls ‘the tortured artist.’ He’s still staring at it when Eames gets back from the bathroom.

“Wait, don’t look at – ”

“Eames,” he says slowly, slamming a hand down before Eames can snatch the paper away, “this – every problem you got wrong – every single step you show is right except for the final answer. You – ”

“Shit.” Eames slumps into his chair and rubs at the back of his neck.

“You were _lying_ about being shitty at math? You purposely wrote down wrong answers on your exam. You purposely – what – I don’t – _why_?” Arthur blinks, more baffled than anything else by the self-sabotage.

“You must know,” Eames says, swallowing, looking so self-conscious Arthur wants to reach over and slap him, make him get a grip because it’s a little terrifying seeing him like this.

“No. No, I don’t,” Arthur says the second before he realizes he does. He knows. He’s known maybe for a while now but it’s one of those things you stifle, bury and smooth over because a clamoring, faithless part of you still has teeth, still says _no_ louder than the rest of the world combined. And so he waits with his heart pushing up into his throat, staring at Eames who’s just within reach and not at all an asshole but beautiful – and maybe even his.

“I wanted your attention,” Eames says, loudly enough to be heard over the ruckus. “And when I had it, there was no way I could let it go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don't already suspect, I had both Mean Girls and Simple Math in my head while I wrote this. :)
> 
> Also cross-posted to [Tumblr](http://scribblscrabbl.tumblr.com/post/136971265104/post-holiday-fic).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] pretend](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7542346) by [flosculatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flosculatory/pseuds/flosculatory)




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